Mine stays almost completely quiet most of the time, because I've trimmed the stuff running in the background to an absolute minimum.

On which OS?

I've done that in the past, back when I was running Linux on very slow & apparently somewhat fragile solid state devices on a netbook, and when trying to keep traditional drives as quiet as possible in a desktop pretending to be a server that was on all hours, but for the most part I leave logging on and not overly buffered these days. SSDs are quiet and reliable¹ ATM.

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[1] though for anything I care about I still RAID1² everything

[2] with devices from different sources, to reduce the chance of both dying at the same time (or the second dying before the first is replaced and the mirror rebuilt)

It is good to know of the HD is in use so I can disable the perpetrator. I don't want to wear out my HDs for some convinience of a developer.

It is also the reason I like mechanical relays in car. You can hear the startup sequence and listen if something is wrong.